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The ocean is a source of life and resilience—for people and cultures, for livelihoods, for climate stability.

But it's under growing stress from overfishing, warming, pollution, acidification, deoxygenation, extreme climate events—all happening at once, and often interacting.

The ocean is hurtling toward catastrophic shifts with increasingly unpredictable and sudden effects.

As ocean scientists, we've documented these changes in detail and have been sounding the alarm for decades—but meaningful political action is still lagging.

To help close the gap between what humanity must do and what we are doing, we need to rethink our role as scientists—not only to contribute knowledge and ideas, but as active participants in change. This will require structural changes in how we work, how we're funded and trained, and how we measure success.

Ocean alliances

We must go beyond informing policy and actively help shape the responses to the complex problems facing the ocean.

Ocean scientists should build stronger alliances with civil society, government and Indigenous and local communities—engaging more people earlier for more effective, equitable solutions.

We've seen many of this kind of work. In Belize, ocean scientists worked with fishers, tour guides and government to build a coral restoration project with some of the strongest long-term survival rates documented in the region.

In North and West Africa, illegal and unregulated fishing threatens marine ecosystems and economic stability. Here, the Marine and Coastal Areas Management in North and West Africa project is equipping regional institutions with geospatial tools and training, to help them address these threats.

These collaborations take extra work and funding. But experience shows that it's worth it, for both research quality and practical impact.

Grabbing attention

These projects show the value of early engagement with policymakers and government. We can do our jobs and produce rigorous research and publish papers, but the stakes are too high to stop there.

Science must remain independent, to be free to critique policy and governance. But we can maintain our integrity while also communicating about and designing our work in ways that will make policymakers listen and act and involve them and other relevant actors.

We should be specific about whose attention we want to grab. What motivates them, and how can they be involved? Even short-term engagement can shape policy and funding.

We've also seen many benefits of broader community engagement. Bringing ordinary people into the process strengthens trust in science, which is so important as we face persistent climate and environmental misinformation.

Encouraging citizens to take part in and inform science relevant to them can sharpen our research and make resulting policies more effective and equitable. Their involvement also leads people to push for more action.

Making it personal

Part of the challenge we confront is the ocean's vastness, and the scale of the threats it faces. We need to make the science personal and connect people to the problems and solutions, showing that although these systems are complex, they are not limitless.

We can start by explaining the ocean's significance not just in environmental terms, but also for individual lives, jobs, health and food security. Interdisciplinary collaboration with climate sociologists, behavioral scientists and educators can improve understanding of opinions and narratives that motivate action—or inaction—and how we can communicate more effectively.

This is a lot—and it's important that we don't place the full responsibility on individual scientists. Many are just trying to survive in the system—and we find ourselves now in an exceptionally challenging moment for science.

We can start to improve this by looking at how we define and recognize impact. What if we evaluated work not just by papers published, but also in terms of decision-makers or communities engaged? Changing the metrics of success could expand the kind of research we choose—and can afford—to prioritize.

We also need to think about how funding is allocated and emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration that allows us to bring in more perspectives and experience, instead of expecting each scientist to balance more and more tasks demanding diverse skills.

And of course, governments and institutions need to provide more support—money and backing—to help make this deeper engagement possible.

We're going through a remarkable period of intersecting environmental, social and geopolitical crises. Ocean science can be part of the solution—not only to the daunting environmental challenges we face, but also by fostering collaboration which can contribute to understanding, global solidarity and diplomacy.

As science and its supporting infrastructure are increasingly sidelined, defunded or politicized, it's vital to defend our role at the heart of just, inclusive and forward-looking governance.

Much is being asked of ocean scientists, as the field engages with urgent social and environmental issues. Sometimes, it can feel like our warnings go unheard. But we can't stop trying. The future of the ocean and of the societies it sustains depends on it.